카즈오 이시구로의 『남아있는 날들』에 나타난 전체주의 동조자의 평범한 악/근본악 연구

초록

This paper aims to explore connotations of evil of totalitarian sympathizer who collaborates with totalitarian regime by analyzing The Remains of the Day, a fiction written by a Japanese English writer, Kazuo Ishiguro. As theoretical scaffoldings for this study, this paper critically utilizes Hannah Arendt's extensive and controversial report on Adolf Eichmann and her arguments on Eichmann's evil of banality as well as Immanuel Kant's philosophical treatise on radical evil. Then, this paper argues that the evil of banality is in fact resonates with the radical evil because both of them share an ideological fantasy of stringent duty as absolute moral tenet ironically formed through ordinary man's self-deception. In the novel, Stevens, an English butler, shades his hidden totalitarian desire and banality under his subsided unreliable narration saturated with ideological fantasy of replacement of moral duty to occupational duty. Though he, going through turmoil of his master, Lord Darlington, a complicit to Nazi, gradually gets disillusioned at his ossified belief on his master and nationalism imbued by fascism, Stevens cannot help falling short of abandoning the whole ideological fantasy which results in ambiguous ending in which it is not certain whether Stevens comes to an epiphany of the true meaning of his past life as a butler/totalitarian sympathizer or not.

키워드